Watergate lawyer: Trump a witness against himself

Attorney Phillip Allen Lacovara of Sanibel was counsel to Watergate special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski. He delivered oral arguments in the Supreme Court case that led to Richard Nixon being forced to turn over recordings of Oval Office conversations.(Photo: SPECIAL TO THE NEWS-PRESS)

A former top attorney in the Watergate special prosecutor's investigation of Richard Nixon gives no credence to a claim by President Trump's personal lawyers that the president is not under investigation for obstruction of justice.

"The denials by one of President Trumps' lawyers that he is actually under investigation should be discounted to zero," said Philip Lacovara, a Lee County resident who served as special counsel to Watergate special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski in the probe that led to the 1974 resignation of Nixon.

"This is another part of the 'generate some smoke to blind the public' strategy," he said.

Attorney Philip Lacovara, left, walks with Special Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworsk (center) and Richard Ben-Veniste (right) on their way to U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. in July 1974 to argue that President Richard Nixon should give up the Watergate Tapes. The court ruled in favor of the special prosecutor and Nixon resigned a month later. Lacovara is now a Lee County resident. The Associated Press.(Photo: John Duricka, AP)

A registered Republican, Lacovara drafted the subpoena for recordings of Nixon's Oval Office conversations with top aides during the Watergate cover-up.

When Nixon refused to release the tapes, Lacovara argued the special prosecutor's case for releasing the tapes before the Supreme Court, which ruled 8-0 that they had to be turned over to Jaworski.

Attorney Jay Sekulow, a member of the personal legal team assembled by Trump, told multiple Sunday newsmaker programs that there is no investigation into the president because Trump has not been notified he is under investigation and was told by fired FBI director James Comey that he was not under investigation.

Lacovara told The News-Press that lack of a Justice Department target letter directed to the president does not mean there is no investigation into possible obstruction of justice in Trump's firing of Comey.

"The fact of an investigation is often not reported to the subject of the investigation until relatively later in the process, such as when the prosecutor wants to obtain statements, be it under oath or informally from the subject of an investigation," Lacovara said Monday. "There's more than enough evidence, as I and many others have said, to warrant an obstruction of justice investigation."

In his talk show rounds, Sekulow referred to a letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to Trump recommending firing Comey. He claimed that because the president acted on a recommendation from the Justice Department, no legal case can be made that Trump obstructed justice.

Lacovara responds that the president's own words make that a difficult defense.

"Probably the strongest evidence against the president has come from his mouth on several occasions and that his repeated assertions — in his Tweets, in his Lester Holt interview and in his remarkable conversations with the Russian ambassador and Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office," Lacovara said. "In all of those he said the reason he fired Comey had nothing to do with any advice he got from the attorney general."

Lavocara said he expects that while leaks sometime stimulate public attention to an investigation, he believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be "circumspect" as the investigation continues.

"They recognize that counter strategies from offenders is to make this whole matter about leaks," he said. "When we created the Watergate special prosecutors's office, Archie Cox and the other parts of the senior staff were extremely insistent that there be no leaks whatsoever."

Watergate precedents

Saturday marked the 45th anniversary of the day security guard Frank Wills noticed a piece of tape over the lock bolt on a door to the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex in Washington. Wills called police.

Five burglars with connections to the Nixon re-election campaign were found inside the office, and a long national nightmare began.

Trump has called the current investigation a witch hunt. Lacovara sees it as an exercise of the professional responsibility that independent counsel from Cox down to current Independent Counsel Robert Mueller have to find the truth, whatever the fallout.

"It is extremely rare to have a professional federal prosecutor motivated by politics," he said.

While working on the Watergate investigation Lacovara was asked how he, as a Republican, could put the Republican president through what amounted to criminal investigation.

"I would say there is no Republican or Democratic way of enforcing the law or interpreting criminal statutes and I think that’s really the case in this situation, you do leave your politics at the door," Lacovara said.

"A crime is a crime if it’s a crime, whether committed by a person in your own political party or the opposite party," he said.